In the past and continuing into the present, television, radio, and printed publications, such as newspapers and magazines, have dominated the delivery of news, sports, and entertainment content to the public. Consequently, advertisers have typically budgeted a substantial portion of their advertising resources to advertising in these media. As used herein, the term “advertiser” includes an advertiser or an agency representing the advertiser.
By way of a non-limiting example, if a television advertiser wants to launch an advertising campaign or place an advertisement, the advertiser typically bases the decision about advertising placement on marketing data. Included in the marketing data is information that enables the advertiser to assess whether to advertise during television programs which include specific content of interest to a projected audience of viewers who are expected to be most receptive to the advertising according to that marketing information.
For example, if the advertiser possesses marketing information that indicates its advertising is expected to be most successful when viewed during a television program featuring a musical competition, the advertiser will likely seek to place advertising to be viewed during that television program and perhaps other similar television programs, i.e., content-specific television programs relating to musical competitions, such as American Idol, The Voice, etc. In that way, the advertiser can expect to reach a collective audience which is most likely to be receptive to the advertising. Stated differently, the audience of interest to the advertiser is targeted through content-specific television programs, such that the content is a “proxy” to reach that audience, and each program is a content-specific “proxy channel” to target a segment of the collective audience. Therefore, the advertising through which goods or services are being marketed is targeted at a collective viewing audience based on content-specific television programs (e.g., programs of the musical competition genre) as a proxy to reach that collective audience.
In the present example, once the content-specific television program or genre is identified, the advertiser must contract with the publisher(s) of the television program(s) whose content is a proxy for the audience that the advertiser wants to target, which will be effective against the advertisement or advertising campaign the advertiser is trying to run. However, in today's television industry, for example, the advertiser must then negotiate with each content publisher to place the advertising. Such negotiations typically require a significant number of personnel and budgeted advertising resources to contract with the content publishers, such as Fox Broadcasting Company for American Idol, NBC for The Voice, etc., to target the collective audience, because the advertiser is using content as a proxy. That is, in order to assure the targeted audience is reached, the advertiser typically spreads budgeted advertising resources across at least several of the television programs whose content is used as a proxy by entering into advertisement placement contracts with multiple content publishers.
With the advent of Internet connectivity and the World Wide Web, the delivery of information and entertainment content has begun to increasingly shift to publication over the Internet. Currently, services such as CNBC deliver news content, services such as ESPN deliver sports content, and services such as Netflix and Hulu deliver entertainment content including movies and television programs over the Internet. Many of these services are dependent on an advertising revenue model, such that advertisers also place paid advertisements that accompany the information or entertainment content delivered over the Internet in addition to, or in some instances as an alternative to, traditional television, radio, and print advertising. Furthermore, other Internet enabled services, such as email services and other informational services, include advertisements to obtain revenue.
Accordingly, one particularly explosive area of growth in the field of advertising and, in particular, video advertising, is over the Internet. Video advertising over the Internet is currently supported by many hardware platforms, sometimes referred to herein as “client” or “user” devices. For example, video advertising can be displayed in web browsers of computers. Video advertising is also increasingly being displayed on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers within apps. With such advertising, the video advertising is typically “streamed” from a server to the client device over a network, such as the Internet, a wireless telephone network, a private network, etc.
Due to the growing acceptance of delivery of information and entertainment content via the Internet, advertisers who want to reach a certain audience can reach that audience online, instead of through conventional television advertising, because the targeted audience can be targeted by online advertising and online advertising is typically less expensive than conventional television advertising.
Importantly, the World Wide Web is generally conducive to implementing surveys, associating them with advertisements contemporaneously delivered via the Internet, and collecting responses as survey data quickly and inexpensively. For example, commonly assigned co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/455,314 filed on May 28, 2009, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATED ONLINE SURVEY, which is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety by this reference, relates to surveying specific characteristics of a website viewer population, such as demographic and psychographic statistics, which aids website owners and advertisers in optimizing advertising.
While these surveys have been used to evaluate the impressions of a viewing audience to the advertising, advertisers typically continue to embrace the paradigm of relying on marketing data to decide how to spend budgeted advertising resources as between conventional television, radio, and/or print advertising vis-à-vis online advertising. Furthermore, the marketing data continues the traditional approach of using content as a proxy to target the collective audience of consumers for the products and services that are advertised. That is, the paradigm continues to be content-centric. As a consequence of the existing paradigm, advertisers continue to spread their advertising across many televisions and have limited the audience that may be receptive to advertising delivered over the Internet.
These and other limitations of the prior art will become apparent to persons skilled in the art upon a reading of the following descriptions and a study of the several figures of the drawing.